I considered this. It's *potentially* a problem, but I think we should not try to deal with it for now:
- Normally, temp files will go in /tmp - so it should be fine to construct paths of entirely ascii characters. - Frontends that want the wheel to end up elsewhere can ask for it in a tmp directory first and then move it, so there's a workaround if it becomes an issue. - We already have workarounds for the commonest case of UTF-8 paths + C locale: ignore the locale and treat paths as UTF-8. - The 'right' way to deal with it on Unix is to make all paths bytes, which would introduce a similar issue on Windows. If paths have to be bytes in some situations and unicode in others, both frontends and backends need extra complexity to handle that. - If your non-ascii username breaks stuff on Python 2... Python 3 is ready to make your life easier. Thomas On Tue, Sep 5, 2017, at 07:33 AM, Nathaniel Smith wrote: > Hi all, > > Quick question about an arcane topic: currently, PEP 517 says that > paths are always represented as unicode strings. For example, when the > frontend calls build_wheel, it has to create a temporary dir to hold > the output wheel, and it passes this in as an absolute path > represented as a unicode string. > > In Python 3 I think this is totally fine, because the surrogate-escape > system means that all paths can be represented as unicode strings, > even on systems like Linux where you can have paths that are invalid > according to Python's idea of the filesystem encoding. > > In Python 2, if I understand correctly (and I'm not super confident > that I do), then there is no surrogate-escape, and it's possible to > have paths that can't be represented as a unicode object. For example, > if someone's home directory is /home/stéfan in UTF-8 but Python thinks > that the locale is C, and a frontend tries to make a tmpdir in > $HOME/.local/tmp/ and pass it to a backend then... everything blows > up, I guess? > > So I guess this is a question for those unfortunate souls who > understand these details better than me (hi Nick!): is this actually a > problem, and is there anything we can/should do differently? > > -n > > -- > Nathaniel J. Smith -- https://vorpus.org > _______________________________________________ > Distutils-SIG maillist - Distutils-SIG@python.org > https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/distutils-sig _______________________________________________ Distutils-SIG maillist - Distutils-SIG@python.org https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/distutils-sig
